Do Men and Women Economists Choose the Same Research Fields?

This paper describes the gender distribution of research fields in economics by
means of a new dataset about researchers working in the world top-50 Economics
departments, according to the rankings of the Econphd.net website. We
document that women are unevenly distributed across fields and test some
behavioral implications from theories underlying such disparities. Our main
findings are that the probability that a woman works in a given field is positively
related to the share of women in that field (path-dependence), and that the share
of women in a field at a given department increases with the sizes of the
department and field, whereas it decreases with their average quality. These
patterns, however, are changing for younger female faculty members. Further, by
using Ph.D. cohorts, we document how gender segregation across fields has
evolved over the last four decades.